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ible academic success to a position where the third lesson – give back and pay forward – has outsized impact. That lesson has led Dr. Montgomery Rice to specialize in fertility and obstet- rics. One particularly decisive moment as a young resident changed the trajectory of her career.
Assisting during a gynecological surgery to remove tumors that impacted a patient’s fertility, Dr. Montgomery Rice took note that the attending surgeon was pregnant, the resident was preg- nant, the anesthesiologist was pregnant; three women. They were operating facing the side to accommodate their pregnant stomachs, they were playing jazz music, and they were laugh- ing and enjoying themselves; each one focused on helping this woman have a baby. Dr. Montgomery Rice said to herself,
“This is my kind of party,” and never looked back.
She went into reproductive endocrinology and fertility, even- tually contributing to the pivotal early research that looked at fertility drugs that permitted women to produce the number of eggs required to go through a successful in vitro fertilization procedure. It quickly became very clear to her that there were challenges in women’s reproductive opportunities that had never been addressed because women’s experiences and desires had never been prioritized.
That’s when Dr. Montgomery Rice’s advocacy for underserved communities truly began. She accepted the position of Di- rector of the Center of Women’s Health Research at Meharry Medical College in Nashville, opening the first center for wom- en’s health and research, and looked at diseases that dispropor- tionately impacted women of color. The need was obvious. For example, although statistics showed that black women had a lower incidence of breast cancer, they had a higher mortality rate for that disease. Similarly, black women had much higher rates of cardiovascular disease, fibroid disease, endometriosis, etcetera, and Dr. Montgomery Rice’s team set out to uncover
the reasons why. The cause of the discrepancy in breast cancer mortality soon became clear; her team discovered that black women and women of color tended to have more dense breast tissue, so the analog mammograms that had been in common use simply were not sufficient to detect their tumors. This re- search – and accompanying advocacy that Dr. Montgomery Rice is known for – resulted in digital mammography becom- ing the new standard in breast cancer screening.
The key to her successful research studies has always been Dr. Montgomery Rice’s willingness to engage people where they were; that means respectfully reaching out to people in the community where they live and in the ways that they tend to respond to. Specifically, she employed nursing coordinators in Black, Hispanic, and other communities to make potential clinical trial participants of color feel as comfortable and re- ceptive as possible to being a part of the study. Those efforts produced results; Dr. Montgomery Rice continuously had the highest level of participation in those underserved communi- ties. The benefit of a diverse population in the clinical trials is obvious—it helps researchers identify and address physio- logical differences that may impact outcomes among different populations.
At the helm of Morehouse School of Medicine, one of the four historic black medical schools, Dr. Montgomery Rice has continued its historic mission to diversify healthcare, im- prove access to healthcare, and work towards the elimination of healthcare disparities. When she first accepted the position of Dean in 2012, the class was fifty-six M.D. students. It is now 125. They increased their degree-granting programs from four to sixteen, and added a Physician’s Assistant program and are gearing up to add a nursing program. The school has worked very intentionally to increase its student population from the 119 most underserved counties in the state of Georgia, mostly
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